Meet our newest acquisition

Now that all the paperwork has finally been finished, I'd like to introduce you to our new orchard! Our name for it perhaps is a bit dramatic since it's only around 1000 sq. meters or a quarter of an acre. But it's only 10 minutes walk from our front door and has 19 apple, cherry and peach trees growing on it, most of which are young trees. When we started looking at the property about 2 years ago, we hoped we could keep chickens or even a goat there. But the zoning laws state that no permanent … [Read more...]

Decorating with your bush & shrub trimmings

Spring has sprung in Germany and the weather this week has simply been GLORIOUS! We've had highs in the 60's and 70's...and this weekend it's supposed to be up to 80F. Hard to imagine that spring is truly here after our -18C winter - but hopefully this lovely start to spring is just a taste of what is to come. We deserve it! ;) The trees, bushes and shrubs are in full bloom here and I've been admiring all the forsythia bushes around the neighborhood as their buds have started to open. I happened … [Read more...]

Trees, tripods and other random stuff

I've been in a cleaning frenzy today. We're trying out a new system here where I use Monday as my "get the house back in order after the bomb went off weekend is over." We're usually so busy focusing on getting big projects done that the house is in disarray and there are fur tumbleweeds all over the place. There's always a huge pile of laundry, lots of dishes and also some baking to be done (unless I am really ambitious on Sundays which I'm really going to have to start doing!) I managed to … [Read more...]

Our seedlings are indeed seedlings!

As usual I'm a bit overdue to write about what is happening with our little seedlings - but what can you do? I did take some photos of them on March 18th which was about a month after they'd been planted. As you may notice, the zucchini were sprouting like weeds and most of the tomato seeds had popped up as well. I took some new photos this morning because we already needed to start replanting some of the seeds, separating out some of the weaklings and putting the seedlings into bigger … [Read more...]

Cayenne harvesting

We got quite a few nice peppers from our cayenne plants despite not really giving much love or attention to them. We decided to harvest a few of the peppers before we went away last week and hung them up in our kitchen to dry. We tried a little piece of one of them in our chicken penne arrabiata dish the other night but probably could have used a tiny bit more. Stefan tried them once before and they were very hot so we were trying to be a bit cautious so we wouldn't end up with our pasta being … [Read more...]

Eggplants, chilies and tomatoes – oh my!

Once again it's been a while since our last garden update so here goes...I mentioned once or twice that we are giving our lettuce a try in window boxes along our courtyard and at the front of the house. These are the plants by the courtyard which are really thriving. They apparently get just enough sun during the day and I water them all the time too. We're looking forward to starting to harvest a few leaves at a time from each plant so we can hopefully keep them growing but still enjoy our own … [Read more...]

Housewarming plants

Last weekend we had a rather large housewarming party at our house with about 50 guests and 15 kids...it was definitely a pretty big deal and we were completely blessed to have gorgeous weather which allowed us to have the party outside. One of the things I find great about housewarming parties (this was our second) is that you often get plants as gifts. Some people might find this annoying or not want to take on the "burden" of some plants - but I'm always totally excited. We got 3 plants at … [Read more...]

The housewarming party

We had our housewarming party here on Saturday night and although it was a lot of fun, we're both happy to have it behind us now. We ended up with about 50 guests and around 15 children ranging in age from a few weeks to 5 years old. Nearly everyone who said they'd be attending made it here and a few that we didn't invite too...but I'll come back to that later. One of the things which was really essential for this party was lots of planning and to do lists for us to keep track of everything … [Read more...]

Tomatoes galore

So far, everything is still thriving in the greenhouse and our tomatoes are now showing some massive signs of life. Here's a general view when you glance in the direction of the tomatoes....As you can probably notice (click on the image to make it larger), we have lots of little tomatoes all over our plants finally. I think the drastic pruning really helped even though we probably did wait a bit too long. Next year, we won't make that same mistake. These are the Colibri tomatoes you see above … [Read more...]

Our new fig tree and how to grow figs

fig tree

I can't believe I didn't write about this sooner but I guess I've had other things on my mind... When Stefan's family was here two weeks ago, his aunt brought us a lovely little fig tree. It has several figs on it and I would say that they are beginning to ripen as well....but I thought I better do a bit more research about the plant before I do something wrong :-) Traditionally, a fig tree is given as a gift to bring prosperity for a newly married couple or to celebrate a new home. I … [Read more...]